Hello, fellow time traveler!

The new year is nigh, so it's time for me to pop my head up, blink a few times, then ask, "... what... year... is it?" and try to figure out what's happened since 2023[www.bscotch.net].

A lot, it turns out!


https://i.imgur.com/S9F0ZFd.jpg
The biggest thing for 2024 was, of course, Crashlands 2 becoming nearly complete. Back when we announced the game in 2023 we thought we'd have it done by the end of this year. We were optimistic on that front, but not for lack of trying! To give you an idea of just how hard we've been working over the past year:

• 🎨 We added 700 new art assets to the game, consisting of 2200 parts (animated elements, animation frames, variants, etc). We had to add a whole new artist to the team to make this happen!
  
• 📚 We added 80,000 words to the game's text (quests, item descriptions, etc), bringing the total to 130,000. That's like... two novels? 100,000 words have been translated so far, thanks to the work of dozens of translators and editors.
  
• 🧸 We added 3,100 new assets (items, resources, characters, quest nodes, etc).
  
• 🌐 We updated the World Map 2,300 times and the asset database 2,200 times.
  
• 🧑‍💻 We added 18,000 lines of code.
  
• 📦 We built and tested 333 versions of the game. Since we have separate builds for each platform (Windows, iOS, and Android), that's a total of 999 builds!

That's a lot! Especially with our tiny content team (2 artists, 1 game programmer, 1 writer). And even more so given that our team also added 👶two more entire humans👶 to the mix! (Welcome to the world, Ruby and Jack!)

But hey, we're still on track for a Q1 2025 release and we'll be making the official release date announcement Soon™!


Some cool things happened for the original Crashlands in 2024, too:

• We sold more copies this year than in the past several years combined, thanks to excitement around Crashlands 2 and to some very aggressive discounting.
  
• Floydson did a complete playthrough of Crashlands. It's amazing to see the entire game compressed down to 2.5 hours and the commentary is hilarious.

Levelhead's community is still making levels and doing cool stuff:

• Our first time in Games Done Quick! IllegallySam beat the campaign in 46 minutes, which is wild considering I still haven't even beat the game at all...
  
• Players published 13,000 new levels, 2,000 of which graduated into the Tower.
  
• Player FlowArt[www.bscotch.net] takes the lead for most-played levels: 250 days of playtime accumulated from 2.5 million plays!
  
• Player Cire[www.bscotch.net] takes the record for most published levels (884), and also has the most levels in the Tower this year (229). Player Sabre[www.bscotch.net] is just behind on total levels.
  
• Player Lommuck Fangiant[www.bscotch.net] leads in Ribbons with a staggering total of nearly 18,000! Enough to make me suspicious... In second place we have BeneficialExcellence[www.bscotch.net] with over 6,900.
  
• Player JuiceBox[www.bscotch.net] has the lead in Shoes (9,600+), followed by Cire[www.bscotch.net] in second place with 8,607.

Next up is getting Crashlands 2's release date announced, and then getting the dang thing finally done. We're tired, but still so excited because we absolutely cannot wait to get it into your hands. We've poured our hearts, souls, time, blood, sweat, tears, and everything else we have into this game, and we'll be sharing it with you soon!


With that, it's time to close out this edition of the Bscotch Ballyhoo. Until next time, go wishlist Crashlands 2 on Steam, if you haven't already!

Oh, and our 500th podcast[podcast.bscotch.net] episode (!) comes out on January 1st, 2025! Did we plan that? Nope! Wait, I meant YES DEFINITELY we're super good at planning...

💖 Your Spacetime Anomaly,

Adam Coster

Webslinger @ Bufferedvideo Stillloadingans

P.S. Bscotch is now on Bluesky[bsky.app] since that site's really popping off. Sam[bsky.app] and myself[bsky.app] are on there, too. We'll post little previews, videos, behind-the-scenes commentary, blah blah blah over there now and then, so check us out!

Hey there, fellow adventurer!

Welcome to the latest edition of the Bscotch Ballyhoo Newsletter[www.bscotch.net]. This time it's all about the cozier side of Crashlands 2, plus an update to our release window.

Let's get into it.

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While Crashlands is an action-adventure game at its core, it has all kinds of cozy/wholesome elements: pets, farming, fishing, home-building & decor, and a delightfully weird cast of characters to befriend.

In the sequel, we wanted to let players relax more deeply into the cozy side of the game, so we made all of those features more satisfying so that you can really lean into them. And we've got a new trailer to let you experience that vibe right now!

Yeah, there's still a lot of combat in Crashlands 2. But we've also expanded the combat styles so that you can stay a bit more removed from the action if that's your jam:

• Story Mode: Play on the lowest difficulty setting so that you can focus on the story and the cozy elements of the game with less combat stress.
• Environmental Mastery: The world is super dynamic, and you can use this to avoid direct combat by leading enemies into environmental hazards and tricking them into fighting each other.
• Sneaky Little Sneak: By turning yourself invisible, buffing your speed, using distance weapons and traps, letting your pet help you out, and other tricks, you can keep yourself quite out of harm's way.

---

Since a lot of the coziness of Crashlands 2 comes from the homestead you build for yourself (and your new friends!), we've put together another Ballyhoo Video to go with the cozy trailer. It's about how base-building works in Crashlands 2. Give it a watch: you'll see that things have come a long way since the original!

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Alright, let's rip the bandage off: Crashlands 2 will not be launching in 2024 like we planned.

When we announced the game in June 2023 we thought that "2024" was a wide enough, far-away-enough target that it was a safe timeline. Turns out it wasn't, but we were only off by a little bit: we'll be launching Crashlands 2 very early in 2025.

So at least it's a small delay. But why delay at all?

The short answer is that it's not really a delay, but a miscalculation. All timelines are just guesses, and we guessed wrong. The longer answer is that games have 3 levels of being "done", and we can't quite get Crashlands 2 through all three by the end of the year.

1. Content-Complete: Everything we intend to be in the game is in there, in its finished state, and fully tested by our team.
2. Player-Feedback-Adjusted: The Content-Complete game has been played by a bunch of people outside of our team and we've used their feedback to fix balance issues, make confusing stuff clear, and fix any bugs we missed. (We'll be enlisting a few dozen volunteers from the community for this; if you want to be involved in that, keep an eye on our Discord[discord.com]!)
3. Launch-Ready: We've passed all checks from our publishing and store partners, the text has been fully translated into all target languages and checked for errors, and we have the green light to launch from everyone involved.

We'll be through the Content-Complete phase and will have made a lot of progress on the other two by the end of this year. The winter holidays and New Year throw a wrench into things, but it'll all get finished up pretty quickly in the new year!


And with that, it's time to close out this edition of the Bscotch Ballyhoo. Until next time, go wishlist Crashlands 2 on Steam if you haven't already!

💖 Your Freshly Baked Cookies,

Adam Coster
Webslinger @ Buttersnuggle Shenapigans

P.S. I've made those launch-delay panels available as a meme template[imgur.com], ready for your silly goofs!